Wharton Behavioral Lab

The Wharton Behavioral Lab is where professors survey students for research projects. I had to participate as a requirement for my marketing class, but anyone can be involved. You take 4 or 5 surveys, get $10, and then go home. As soon as I went in though, I wanted to get out. I didn’t care about the studies they were doing, and figured they were controlling for biases anyway. I did an honest job of trying to fill out the surveys faithfully but there was too much incentive to just click the middle box for everything. I got out in 20 minutes and got $13.25, or effective hourly rate of $39.75 (incremental $3.25 was for my role in an imagined negotiation).

An easy fix would be to require people to stay for the entire hour. If that were the case I would probably just read the questions and answer them to avoid twiddling my thumbs for 40 minutes. I’m glad they didn’t figure this out though. Otherwise I’d still be there now.

Switching Gmail Usernames

Yesterday I began the task of changing my Gmail username to something a little bit more professional (gordonmzhu). The problem is that I have tons of services connected to my old handle (adsense, feedburner, analytics, etc.). I thought about this quite a bit in the past few weeks and it was enough to give me paralysis, but I think I’ve found an almost painless way to go about this. I’ll update again when I finish the process.